Lent 3A, March 19, 2017; The Rev. Pamela L. Werntz

O God of water and thirst, grant us the strength, the wisdom and the courage to seek always and everywhere after truth, come when it may and cost what it will.

I just want to note that in our first reading this morning, I added the translation for the place names because to transliterate the Hebrew word “seen” as Sin just seems wrong. I should have added that the word Nile doesn’t appear in the Hebrew text – it’s just the river, and Horeb means “desert.” Perhaps the place names are not important to translate, but I couldn’t get past the distraction of calling the place in the Sinai, “Sin,” and I didn’t want you to either, particularly because our cantata text is all about sin. When you hear it, listen remembering that sin, according to the Bible, is separation from Love from neighbor. Sin is what we do or fail to do that keeps us apart from Love of neighbor and of God who is Love. Our scripture readings for today are not directly addressing sin, but are reflections on thirst, the physical and spiritual desire for wellsprings.

I want to say some things to you this morning about the first person to engage in an extended theological discussion with Jesus according to the Gospel of John. And the person who had the longest reported conversation on any topic with Jesus in all of the Gospels. And the first person reported to have evangelized a city, to be an apostle, according to the Gospels. They are, of course, the same person – the Samaritan woman at the well. The Gospel of John doesn’t honor her with a name – doesn’t even try to make one up. I call her Sylvie because of that great jailhouse blues song by Huddie Ledbetter, “Bring me little water, Sylvie.” [sing the first verse] It’s a song about needing a drink of water every little once in a while.

What I want to tell you is that this Samaritan woman has been grossly mistreated by theologians and preachers and Sunday School teachers who have said that if she were a good woman, she wouldn’t have been at the well alone in the middle of the day. If she were a good woman, she wouldn’t have had five husbands and she certainly wouldn’t be with a man who was not her husband. But, you know what? I think that’s nonsense. There’s nothing here to suggest that she is anything but a good woman. Bold, maybe. Uppity enough to ask some questions and get some answers and then tell the people in the city that she might have met the one who’s going to save them all. They believed in Jesus, were loyal to Jesus, John writes, because of the woman’s testimony – literally because of her Word. Our Sylvie is a truth-teller from the very beginning to the very end of this story. So see if you can get the idea that she was somehow tainted or immoral out of your heads, because it’s just not true.

This is a story that takes place very early in John’s Gospel, which begins as you know, “In the beginning was the Word.” If we were listening to a reading of John’s whole narrative, in Greek, logos would still be ringing in our ears. The Word. The Word. The Word. In this story, the people believed the woman because of her Word/the Word. In John’s Gospel, up to this point, not much has happened. Just to review, in John’s Gospel, we have heard of Jesus’ baptism, of Andrew and Peter, Philip and Nathaniel who have started following Jesus. There’s the wedding feast in Cana; Jesus turning tables over at the Temple in Jerusalem during the Passover, followed by a nighttime meeting with Nicodemus, and enough tension between John the Baptist’s disciples and Jesus’ disciples, that Jesus decided to get out of town and head again back to the Galilee. He could have gone around Samaria, but he decided to go through a place where he was unlikely to be safe because of the historic sibling rivalry between Judeans and Samaritans, all descendants of Jacob, children of Israel. I bet this made his disciples so nervous.

The story goes that Jesus was tired out by his journey. It’s one of the rare moments in the Gospel of John where we get the idea that maybe Jesus’ feet really did touch the ground. He was tired and he was thirsty. Not coincidentally, his temporary resting place was Jacob’s well. Jacob, you may remember, was also traveling away from conflict when he got as far as he could, laid down to rest in what he took to be a godforsaken place, and had one of the great dreams of the Hebrew Bible. When he awoke, he said, “surely God was in this place and I, i did not know.” Surely his name is in this story for that reason. Perhaps it is to emphasize that while Jesus was traveling through a God-forsaken land according to Judeans, God was indeed there too.

There are two more things that I want you to notice here. First, whatever happened to Jesus in this encounter, according to John, it caused him or provoked him to say, “I am” in response to the Samaritan woman’s hope that the Messiah will come and explain everything. “I am” is the name of God revealed to Moses at the burning bush. [1] In the Gospel according to John, this is the only time that Jesus directly acknowledges that he is the Messiah. And he says it not to a Judean, or Galilean, but to a Samaritan, and not to a man, but a woman. He says it to our Sylvie! (Sister Outsider.)

Second, Jesus says “those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.” A few chapters later in John, Jesus says “Let anyone who is thirsty come to me, and let the one who trusts in me drink. As the scripture has said, ‘Out of the one who trusts’ heart shall flow rivers of living water.'” [2] And, in the end, what Jesus says on the cross, according to John, is “I thirst.” John is testifying here to the idea of God being both the water and the thirst – both physically and spiritually – God is the wellspring and God is the desire. It reminds me of Carl Jung’s saying that “only the paradox comes close to comprehending the fullness of life.”

The more I reflected on thirst as I was working on this sermon, the more thirsty I got – physically and spiritually. I thought about times and places in the world that I have visited where I didn’t have access to clean cold water. I thought of how little experience I have with the full one-third of the population of the world that lives in water-stressed conditions; how little experience I have with the lack of clean water that causes thousands of people to die every day. I thought of how little experience I have with the long and back-breaking work of carrying water.

And I thought about how many people (myself included) are thirsty, emotionally and spiritually. I thought about how easily we can see ourselves spiritually in an arid desert, like the people Moses led out of slavery, wandering in a very dry place, feeling like we’re running on empty, looking longingly over our shoulders at some “good old days” when we might have been enslaved but at least we weren’t thirsty! I thought about how we need to keep finding and pointing to those wellsprings from which we can draw living water to refresh our whole beings – bodies, minds, spirits, and to refresh our whole communities which are parched and brittle with thirst for right-relationship and thirst for distributive and restorative justice. The thirst is an indication of the presence of the Holy One. The wellspring is an indication of the presence of the Holy One.

I want to invite you to take a few minutes right now to reflect on your own thirst. These questions will help you discern the degree of your thirst and maybe inspire you to discover ways to find refreshment from God’s abundant living water, which is to say God’s love, poured into your hearts (as Paul says to the church in Rome), God’s love poured out for you.

• What’s the state of your refreshment today? Are you tired and thirsty or rested and satisfied? Or somewhere in between?
• If you are thirsty, for what are you thirsting? If you are satisfied, how can you use your energy to help quench someone else’s thirst? (Because that’s the next step.)
• Toward what wellspring is the Spirit drawing you?
• What tools (or practices) might you need to draw living water? The well is deep and a bucket is needed. What stranger might be holding the bucket for you?

Maybe you don’t have any idea what you might need. But you’re here this morning and that’s a good start! There’s a book I recommend called, Running on Plenty at Work: Renewal Strategies for Individuals. I think it can be applied to communities too. It has useful information for people who are working for wages or people who are working as volunteers, working as family care-givers, and so forth. It’s about moving from a perspective of scarcity to abundance in our lives. It’s about what refreshes – what gives energy, inspiration, and hope. [3] Think of Sylvie and Jesus. Think of the Holy as paradoxically both the thirst and the wellspring as I end with another poem for you this week. Today’s poetry offering is “Thirst,” by Mary Oliver in her book by the same name:

Another morning and I wake with thirst
for the goodness I do not have. I walk
out to the pond and all the way God has
given us such beautiful lessons. Oh Lord,
I was never a quick scholar but sulked
and hunched over my books past the
hour and the bell; grant me, in your
mercy, a little more time. Love for the
earth and love for you are having such a
long conversation in my heart. Who
knows what will finally happen or
where I will be sent, yet already I have
given a great many things away, expect-
ing to be told to pack nothing, except the
prayers which, with this thirst, I am
slowly learning.

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